Family Rights and Child Abuse News

Children Victimized By System Secrecy

by Wendy McElroy

Denise Moore is the Indiana caseworker who recommended taking 4-year-old Anthony Bars away from a loving foster mother and placed him, instead, with a couple who starved and beat him to death over a 10-month period.

Had Moore bothered with the required background check, she would have known that the new "home" had a long record of abuse within the child protective services and that the new "father" had a felony battery conviction for savagely beating his own daughter with an extension cord.

Fox News

July 16, 2011

Child Welfare System Must Grow Up

by Wendy McElroy

The California child welfare system is such a disaster that even the state's Department of Social Services admits families are aggressively torn apart and children unnecessarily placed in foster care.

In L.A. County alone, more than 160,000 children "came into contact" with Child Welfare in 2002; 30,000 are in foster homes -- only one form of foster care. David Sanders, head of the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services, reports that as many as half of those foster children could have stayed at home with "appropriate services" rather than removal. Thus, an L.A. Daily News headline declared that children are being "rushed into foster care," where many remain.

Fox News (CA)

July 16, 2011

Families Pay Price for Government Spending

by Wendy McElroy

The modern two-income family is no better off than the one-income family from decades ago. Indeed, family finances are edging ever closer to disaster.

A major reason families are struggling: the increased size of government and governmental spending. Consider one small example from just one bureaucracy. In 1997, the Adoption and Safe Families Act promoted a new adoption policy to reduce the number of children stranded in foster care -- at a record high as a result of being "removed" from their parents under expanding definitions of "abuse."

ifeminist.com

July 16, 2011

Court Order May Violate First Amendment

by Wendy McElroy

A child custody case in Massachusetts may be placing family court procedures on a collision course with the First Amendment.

Last week, a Massachusetts family court judge issued an order restraining the distribution of a book entitled "Exposing the Corruption in the Massachusetts Family Courts." The author, Kevin Thompson, is a non-custodial parent who feels betrayed by a judicial system that he calls "anti-father." Thompson claims that his book is "banned" in the Boston sense of that word. But according to the order, which Thompson received by mail last Friday, impounding the book is necessary to protect the privacy interests of the minor child. In other words, the book includes information about Thompson's 4-year-old son, which violates a minor's privacy in a legal proceeding.

Fox News

March 29, 2006

Families Pay Price for Government Spending

by Wendy McElroy

The modern two-income family is no better off than the one-income family from decades ago.

Social engineering includes the child abuse industry and the sexual harassment industry. Critics refer to them as "industries" because their enforcement policies have established bloated and expensive bureaucracies that slurp at the public trough. The cost to taxpaying families is immense.

i Feminist.com

September 30, 2003